Forgiving You Is Hard, but Forgetting Seems Easy

Noreen, Saima; Bierman, Raynett; Macleod, M.D.

doi:10.1177/0956797614531602

Cited by 31 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Interestingly, our study did not show increased suppression-induced forgetting between the two and eight repetition conditions. Although this is inconsistent with some previous findings (Anderson & Green, 2001;Anderson et al, 2004;Noreen & MacLeod, 2013Noreen, Bierman & MacLeod, 2014), it should be noted that other studies have also reported no significant increase in the size of the suppression-induced forgetting effect with increased repetitions (Hertel & Calcaterra, 2005). One reason for this discrepancy may relate to the fact that different studies have used a different number of repetitions.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 95%

Investigating the mediating effect of working memory on intentional forgetting in dysphoria

Noreen

Cooke

Ridout

2019

Psychological Research

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Our aim was to determine if deficits in intentional forgetting that are associated with depression and dysphoria (subclinical depression) could be explained, at least in part, by variations in working memory function. Sixty dysphoric and 61 nondysphoric participants completed a modified version of the think/no-think (TNT) task and a measure of complex working memory (the operation span task). The TNT task involved participants learning a series of emotional cue-target word pairs, before being presented with a subset of the cues and asked to either recall the associated target (think) or to prevent it from coming to mind (no think) by thinking about a substitute target word. Participants were subsequently asked to recall the targets to all cues (regardless of previous recall instructions). As expected, after controlling for anxiety, we found that dysphoric individuals exhibited impaired forgetting relative to the non-dysphoric participants. Also as expected, we found that superior working memory function was associated with more successful forgetting. Critically, in the dysphoric group, we found that working memory mediated the effect of depression on intentional forgetting. That is, depression influenced forgetting indirectly via its effect on working memory. However, under conditions of repeated suppression, there was also a direct effect of depression on forgetting. These findings represent an important development in the understanding of impaired forgetting in depression and also suggest that working memory training might be a viable intervention for improving the ability of depressed individuals to prevent unwanted memories from coming to mind.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 95%

Investigating the mediating effect of working memory on intentional forgetting in dysphoria

Noreen

Cooke

Ridout

2019

Psychological Research

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“…However, as previous studies (e.g. Noreen and MacLeod, 2013;Noreen, Bierman and MacLeod, 2014) have demonstrated significant belowbaseline forgetting using a similar number of trials we did not expect this to affect our results.…”

Section: Participantssupporting

confidence: 47%

Examining the impact of thought substitution on intentional forgetting in induced and naturally occurring dysphoria

Noreen

Ridout

2016

Psychiatry Research

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Two experiments were conducted to determine if natural and induced dysphoria is associated with impaired forgetting and, whether a thought-substitution strategy would ameliorate any observed deficits. Study 1: 36 dysphoric & 36 non-dysphoric participants learnt a series of emotional word pairs. Participants were subsequently presented with some of the cues and were asked to recall the targets or prevent the targets from coming to mind. Half of the participants were provided with substitute words to recall instead of the original targets (aided suppression). At final memory testing, participants were asked to recall the targets to all cues. Dysphoric participants exhibited impaired forgetting, even when using a thought substitution strategy. Non-dysphoric participants, however, were able to use substitutes to suppress words. Study 2: 50 healthy participants initially completed the aided condition of the forgetting task. Participants were then given a positive or negative mood-induction, followed by another version of the forgetting task. Although all participants showed a forgetting effect prior to the mood-induction, only the positive group was successful at forgetting after the mood induction. Taken together, these findings do not support the utility of thought-substitution as an aid to forgetting in individuals in a naturally or induced dysphoric mood.

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“…Recent psychological research has sought to establish the extent to which we possess executive control over which memories come to mind, and the mechanisms responsible. Using a wide range of materials, it is now well-established that the repeated attempt to consciously forget unwanted memories impairs their subsequent recall, although debate continues about the nature of the underlying mechanism responsible for such forgetting ( Anderson and Green, 2001 ; Anderson et al, 2004 , 2011 ; Bergström et al, 2009 ; Hanslmayr et al, 2010 ; Noreen and MacLeod, 2013 , 2014, 2015 ; Noreen et al, 2014 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural Correlates of Direct and Indirect Suppression of Autobiographical Memories

2016

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Research indicates that there are two possible mechanisms by which particular target memories can be intentionally forgotten. Direct suppression, which involves the suppression of the unwanted memory directly, and is dependent on a fronto-hippocampal modulatory process, and, memory substitution, which includes directing one’s attention to an alternative memory in order to prevent the unwanted memory from coming to mind, and involves engaging the caudal prefrontal cortex (cPFC) and the mid-ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) regions. Research to date, however, has investigated the neural basis of memory suppression of relatively simple information. The aim of the current study was to use fMRI to identify the neural mechanisms associated with the suppression of autobiographical memories. In the present study, 22 participants generated memories in response to a series of cue words. In a second session, participants learnt these cue-memory pairings, and were subsequently presented with a cue word and asked either to recall (think) or to suppress (no-think) the associated memory, or to think of an alternative memory in order to suppress the original memory (memory-substitution). Our findings demonstrated successful forgetting effects in the no-think and memory substitution conditions. Although we found no activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, there was reduced hippocampal activation during direct suppression. In the memory substitution condition, however, we failed to find increased activation in the cPFC and VLPFC regions. Our findings suggest that the suppression of autobiographical memories may rely on different neural mechanisms to those established for other types of material in memory.

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Forgiving You Is Hard, but Forgetting Seems Easy

Cited by 31 publications

References 37 publications

Investigating the mediating effect of working memory on intentional forgetting in dysphoria

Investigating the mediating effect of working memory on intentional forgetting in dysphoria

Examining the impact of thought substitution on intentional forgetting in induced and naturally occurring dysphoria

Neural Correlates of Direct and Indirect Suppression of Autobiographical Memories

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